Homemade Lego Advent Calendar 2014: Day 14

The story behind the Homemade Lego Advent Calendar: We opted not to buy the Dude a Lego Advent Calendar for the past couple of years. The Dude was quite amenable, countering with: "Ok, then you have to build me something every day until Christmas." Challenge accepted! This is the series of daily posts, cataloguing my builds. As I write this, the Dude is in the playroom shooting targets. Inspired by some of the new weapons we saw yesterday in The Hunger Games: MockingJay Part 1, I went looking for some ideas online. And wowzers, did I come across a fun build:

Lego Crossbow (and it works!)

Yup. I built the Dude a real, working, palm-sized Lego crossbow. And it's awesome.

The majority of the pieces come from our Lego MindStorms (aka Robotics) collection, which was nice because since we built the Rubik's Cube robot, those pieces have been wonderfully sorted in a tackle box. I did have to rethink a few components to work with the pieces we have, but it was still an incredibly quick build: probably 30 minutes, total.

And it works. In fact, the elastics we had were a bit small, so it's actually a bit vicious. Which just means bigger giggles, so it's all good. (For good measure, the Dude and I had a little chat about the appropriateness of aiming downwards at targets, not upwards at people.) If you want to check out the instructions and see this thing in action, check out the video below. Too. Much. (Potentially Dangerous.) Fun. LOL